Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Ancestors is one of the most exciting games of the decade. Despite some frustrating elements, Ancestors is an incredible experience and a tour de force of game design.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a great survival game with an extremely steep learning curve.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an ambitious game. It’s beautiful, deep, and compelling but suffers from a lack of clear direction on how to navigate and appreciate everything that it contains. There hasn’t been a game quite like it before, which unfortunately doesn’t work in Ancestors favor because more time is spent figuring out it’s mechanics than actually enjoying it.

Ancestors contains all manner of intellectual joys – whenever you launch an evolution, for example, your efforts are rated against what science projected – and while it might not feel like much of a game at first, it certainly does when you fathom out how to approach it. As long as you aren’t afraid of games that make you work hard before yielding their rewards, you’ll find that Ancestors comes closer to letting you play god, while still entertaining you, than any game we’ve ever come across previously. How’s that for vaulting ambition? [Issue#186, p.72]

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey on Xbox One is a game that I really admire; in fact it’s got me hooked. The gameplay itself doesn't hold your hand and is for the gamer who likes a challenge. Whilst that does at times mean things feel like a grind, leaving you to repeat the same thing quite a few times, in reality life is hard and the game reflects the brutal nature of this.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey presents us an intriguing survival paleoanthropological simulation, where we can tangibly live the evolutionary mechanics that brought the early primates to become us. This comes with a fair share of repetitiveness and frustration though, making the experience only advisable to the most patient gamers.

We need to praise the effort to make something new and, in this case, the additions to add some QoL features. Ancestors is still flawed, but it’s also a game we can’t help but recommend to those interested in new experiences.

I do feel that if you're going to pick up Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, prepare to be patient and be prepared to have zero help from the UI or prompts to help you along your journey. Ater playing this for an extended time, I feel like Hyena bait, not quite the queen of the jungle that I should. As I said above, when a video game isn't willing to at least teach you the basics before throwing you in the deep end of the jungle and waving you goodbye, that's a big red flag for me, a big red flag I can't ignore even with the graphics and audio being stellar.